PC/SC is a standard proposed by the PC/SC workgroup http://www.pcscworkgroup.com/ which is a conglomerate of representative from major smart card manufacturers and other companies. This specification tries to abstract the smart card layer into a high level API so that smart cards and their readers can be accessed in a homogeneous fashion.

This toolkit was written in ANSI C that can be used with most compilers and does NOT use complex and large data structures such as vectors, etc. The C API emulates the winscard API that is used on the Windows platform. It is contained in the library libpcsclite.so that is linked to your application.